English and Drama

Building on Simon During’s argument that many defences of the humanities are “not just useless but damaging” (AHR 58), we challenge liberal apologists for whom the humanities represent either pure resistance to oppressions or an untapped commodity-form. By radicalizing their impracticality to neoliberal policies, we concede the humanities’ uselessness as an index of their unexchangeable Value. To intuit a genitive political economy of the humanities, and thus counteract their subjection to neoliberal reasoning, we crosshatch Marx’s value-form and Kant’s aesthetic judgment.

First, we pursue Value in Marx as an abstraction beyond use-value. This abstraction is the social, which the humanities are predisposed to finesse. Tracing the social-as-Value through the use of tables in Marx’s Capital and Kant’s Anthropology, we suggest that production and use-value are always-already material and abstract. If use-value is an abstract materiality, then its precondition and effect are the social, a material abstraction beyond even the woodenness of the table. A transcendental pure intuition, à la Kant, the social for the humanities is irreducible to exchange- or even use-value.

As the abstract-material condition of possibility for both society and community, the social-as-Value outpaces fundamentalisms of exchange-value. Predicated on reflective judgment, the social-as-Value is beholden to the Kantian or ‘social sublime.’ The social sublime, as subjective universality that cannot be marketed, is irreducible to exchange-value and therefore radically useless to neoliberal political economy. The humanities’ grasp of the social sublime as radically useless is their unexchangeable Value; their uselessness represents a final frontier of opposition to neoliberal reasoning.

In June 2010, the Canadian government published its Commission of Inquiry into the Investigation of the Bombing of Air India Flight 182. Eight months later, in February 2011, a mass grave containing the remains of thirty-two Sikhs who perished in the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984 was discovered in the Rewari District of Haryana, India. Originating in opposite parts of the world, these two events and their aftermaths may seem to have had little to do with each other; however, we relate them to a context that underscores the extent to which Canada and India as secular democratic nation-states are complicit in the transnational production of violence.The first part of our essay focuses on Bruce Hoffman’s “Study of International Terrorism,” which opens the commission’s research volumes. Hoffman argues that the Air India bombing “merely perpetuated a cycle of anti-state, inter-communal violence that fed off itself ” in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the subsequent massacres of thousands of Sikhs throughout India (2010: 34). We critique the taxonomy of secular and religious terrorism in which Hoffman’s analysis is inscribed, because it elides the managerial role of the nation-state in historiographies of violence occurring within, across and beyond the borders of India and Canada. The second part of our essay interprets Srinivas Krishna’s Masala (1991) and “When Lions Roar” (2011), among other texts, as cultural refractions of violence and the “management of grief ” (Bharati Mukherjee) that continue to mark the events of 1984 and 1985 as “unhoused” rather than distinctly Canadian episodes (quoted in Bowen 1997: 59). We pursue our analysis beyond the events themselves to investigate how they are portrayed in flawed historiographies like Hoffman’s and in transnational cultural texts that resist the implications of Hoffman’s analysis. We thus seek to represent not only the cycle of violence but also the “willed, civilised response” to it (Ghosh 2005).

A stalemate has emerged in mainstream liberal/left responses to Trump. Many commentators prefer to see our predicament in terms of either class-based or identity politics. Vis-à-vis the influence of the Chicago school of economics and its structural adjustment schemes, we crosshatch MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign and Polanyi’s Great Transformation to envision overcoming this stalemate. King’s effort to radicalize the welfare state from below by linking struggles against poverty, racism, and imperialism shares Polanyi’s focus on the economy’s embeddedness in society. We underscore the importance of King’s and Polanyi’s visions for building a leftist coalition that does not divorce social from economic justice.

Conventional accounts of rights, citizenship, and political belonging are often deeply rooted in concepts of labor. The study of labor, however, generally continues to derive its concepts from Western histories and experiences. African social history enables scholars to challenge this approach and to rethink labor as such. Relatedly, scholarship on modes of citizenship, political mobilization, and belonging in Africa, especially in relation to labor, goes back at least to Fanon. How do people access the state, its resources, and its patronage when employment or entrepreneurialism do not fulfil this role, as is often the case in Africa and much of the Global South? Addressing these questions via Fanon and Said, both of whom lead us to Gramsci’s concept of the integral state, we argue that to claim the state—rather than the nation or the market—we must recognize as labor the life-worlds and struggles of the poor, the unemployed, or those marginally connected to global markets.